March, April and May photos

I need to get better at blogging.  I love making bread and have been making it weekly now since April this year.  It has been a journey and am learning so much.  To catch up, here are some photos from this past 6 months.  These may be duplicated in previous posts, but I wanted to get a bunch on here.

March, April and May 2012

Crackers

My first attempt to make crackers, from my current favorite cookbook from King Arthur Flour.

The recipe calls for them being baked and eaten in these large rounds, but the last half of the dough I cut into random crackers, makes them a lot more crunchier. I like the sesame, but a little too much cracked pepper.

A successful loaf!

This one turned out wonderful!

I used the pullman pan, but did not put on the lid.  I used King Arthur flour and SAF instant yeast and the plain white bread recipe from KA.  It turned out yummy and delicious.  Made a grilled cheese with it and was great!

Pullman pan

So who has seen this type of pan before?

It's called a pullman pan and I have read that you can use the bread in 5 minutes a day recipes and make sandwich bread with this pan!  I got one, and here is my experiment with it.

Taking the basic boule recipe, I used this pan and baked bread in it.  Ignore the dent in it, that is where I tried to use the thermometer to test the temp.

This first time it came out WAY too dense.  I did like how it filled the pan fully and made a great shape.

So I posted my issue on the breadin5 website, got some suggestions and by then was ready to start another batch of dough.  This time, I am using metric weights instead of volume measurements in making my dough.  This seems to have helped a little with the dense issue, but its still dense and wetter than I am wanting.  I think I am expecting regular yeast bread, which this is not.

I am using unbleached flour, and very fresh yeast, and following it EXACT on the recipe, and based on the suggestions from the website, I put less dough in the pan and gave it a longer rest time.  This resulted in the bread not filling the pan, and not going all the way to the top.

Its a little bit less dense, but not much.  Here is what it looks like cut in to

You can see, I am getting a little bit bigger hole structure, and it tastes just fine, but not like sandwich bread, which is what I want.

Then taking the recipe that comes from the pan manufacturer, for a regular white bread, on the same day I made this last loaf, I decided to make a regular loaf, just so I can see how they taste side by side.  

Here is the regular recipe bread, which also did NOT fill the pan (pout) and also while dense, was not wet like the other one.

Here they are side by side, note the breadin5 one on the left has had a few more slices taken from it :) and the regular one had just come out, so I had not sliced into it when I took this photo.  

For sandwiches, the taste of the traditional bread is much better, now I just have to work on getting it right so that it fills the pan.  I think I may have left out the butter in the recipe, now that I think about it, and am just not sure.  I know I did not let it rise to half an inch from the top, I did it based on time not size in the recipe.  My anxiousness to get it made may also have affected the rise.  So once this bread is eaten up in the next week or so, I will make another traditional recipe of bread and see how that one goes.